Google announces Reader’s imminent demise

The RSS aggregator and management system will be turned off in July.

Google has announced that Google Reader, its RSS aggregation system, will be turned off on July 1st. Citing years of declining usage, Reader is one of several victims of the advertising giant's periodic "spring cleaning."

The Reader RSS platform had a popular Web front-end, and was also used to provide behind-the-scenes support for a wide range of RSS clients.

Current users of Reader will be able to export their list of feeds up until the cut-off date using Google's Takeout facility.

Google's last periodic clean, its "winter clean," saw the company announce the end of support for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) for non-paying customers. After considerable outcry and negotiation with Microsoft, Google postponed the switch-off by six months; it'll now run until July 31st.

That Google was willing to change its plans over EAS might give Reader users a slight glimmer of hope that enough pressure could make the company change its mind. Nonetheless, current users (including most of us here at Ars) should look at alternative services such as NewsBlur.

We'll going to follow up later tonight with some thoughts on replacements.

Crap. Does anyone have any suggestions for a worthy replacement? (Server-based solutions preferred, as I tend to do my RSS reading from more than one device.) I wouldn't mind installing something on a LAMP machine, either, if there's a nice project on sourceforge or github to fill the void.

Declining usage, you say. Like what would happen if you killed a thriving social community and replaced it with shoddy integration with the high-noise, low-signal Google+ and proceed to spend the next year or so indifferently developing your new social network, leaving major shortcomings unaddressed?

Ack, this is annoying. I don't really use the web interface that much (just when I subscribe to something new), but all my RSS apps use Reader as a sync backend (Reeder, NetNewsWire). So all those developers will have to start supporting some other sync service. SIgh. Maybe this is the push I need to finally get a Fever installation up and running on my Linode.

While I want to be upset about this, to be honest, I haven't actively used reader or any of the add on services/apps that cropped up behind it (Feedler, Feedly, Flipboard, Pulse, etc) in over a year. Many of the content I used to follow using reader either had horrible rss or I've since gotten from sources that can better handle mobile and desktop interaction.

Seriously, Reader has been the front page of the Internet for me for years, and this is fucking bullshit. Hopefully someone can point out something that's a drop-in replacement for both the online interface and the Android app.

Declining usage, you say. Like what would happen if you killed a thriving social community and replaced it with shoddy integration with the high-noise, low-signal Google+ and proceed to spend the next year or so indifferently developing your new social network, leaving major shortcomings unaddressed?

I can see where that would cause usage to decline.

Yeah, I forgot about that. I didn't really check what other users were sharing since I had more than enough with my own subscriptions, but manny of my friends were pissed when they got rid of native sharing and replaced it with G+.

If they somehow managed to replicate that experience within G+ then maybe Google would be able to win some of those users back, but I'm not holding my breath.

Declining usage, you say. Like what would happen if you killed a thriving social community and replaced it with shoddy integration with the high-noise, low-signal Google+ and proceed to spend the next year or so indifferently developing your new social network, leaving major shortcomings unaddressed?

I can see where that would cause usage to decline.

I'm still mad that it's almost impossible to curate my own +1. Why is there only ONE place where I can look at all the stuff I've clicked that little button on, and I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH IT!!!

What's really terrible is that the Google Reader API is the backend for lots of mobile apps such that it doesn't matter which platform I'm on, I can get a synced list of stories I've read and not read. Terrible, terrible decision.

What's really terrible is that the Google Reader API is the backend for lots of mobile apps such that it doesn't matter which platform I'm on, I can get a synced list of stories I've read and not read. Terrible, terrible decision.